


Every Poem an Epitaph

by comradeocean



Series: old/abandoned fics purge [2]
Category: History Boys - Bennett
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-22
Updated: 2015-12-22
Packaged: 2018-05-08 13:32:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5498870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/comradeocean/pseuds/comradeocean
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Take up the break down. Or, another one of those stories where Posner has a collapse but he eventually sorts it out with the help of Scripps and everyone lives happily ever after. i.e. copious quoting of poetry and all the other tropes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Every Poem an Epitaph

**Author's Note:**

> Abandoned from November 2007, about 18 months after the first time I dropped/failed out of university. so obviously Idfic of the highest order. I meant to post it to the drinkswithdakin History Boys community on lj. The parts of the story I never got to I've just scrapped. This is what was left. Has shifting!perspectives. Mostly playverse.

_I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you_  
_Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,_  
_The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed_  
_With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,_  
_And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama_  
_And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away -_  
_Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations_  
_And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence_

_I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope_  
_For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love_  
_For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith_  
_But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting._  
_Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:_  
_So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing._

 

_**We shall not cease from exploration  
(1998)** _

__

_i_

Mornings are always the worst.

_(Dakin's got a new client Akthar expecting another daughter Timms out of surgery three months ago no reply yet to the card Poor Lockwood poor Hodge poor poor poor Hector How it feels to be Hectorish without the adoration it was adoration wasn't it?)_

Posner knows about little steps. 4 shuffles between his bed and the computer desk. 23 to get to the kitchen sink. He lives in a box, but at least it's his. As long as the disability cheques keep coming.

_(Timms Crowther Lockwood Akthar Dakin Irwin Ah Irwin Irwin's on the telly tomorrow. Rerun, but might as well the fucker the nerve the fucking nerve Irwin fucking televised hsitory fuck everything that is the case poor fuck Lockwood It's Wittgenstein miss fuck)_

Another set of steps:  
First, a plant. _(allotment, check)_  
If it survives a year, the next stage is a pet. _(Gertrude, check)_  
Is the pet house trained? Can it get along with others? _(check and check)_ Does it follow commands? _(cats don't follow)_  
Then. Then, maybe then there could be relationships pursued, relationships build on mutual respect, communication and trust. _(He goes for quick fucks in alleys with unfamiliar faces on which he tries to pin dark eyes and a swagger, pale eyes and edges of lips shaping words as only a Northerner could. He is pretty and his manners boyish. He is gentle and afterwards he is sore. He trusts them not to ask for more and they trust the same of him. He feel ridiculous, but there he is next time, back for some of the same.)_

The coffee is by the desk or maybe in his hands, or maybe on the desk, a sea of crusted spilt coffee.  
_(In hands that can be something of itself, warm nest. Fingers are angles but how they cup and slide and cusp and his fingers they are angles they are turning they are keys.)_

_(Dakin's got a new client Akthbar has another daughter Scripps Scripps)_

Posner's shoulders and knees creak older than he feels. If there is so much reaching needed to get to the new light of the day then why bother when he can do with the old? The rewards rarely merit the struggle of crawling out. And mornings, they're always the worst. _(Coffee and light look different Dakin and Scripps musn't think too much Rudge then Rudge drycleaning no Timms drycleaning Rudge this flat isn't a Rudge home stocky in the commercials there are men who'd eat Rudge right up but not no not Scripps no yes Scripps there are men who'd eat Scripps as well but more so Rudge and Dakin always Dakin but fuck it all fuck the light)_

_ii_

Gertrude keeps him from drowning completely in misery. Having to take care of something utterly dependent seems to do the trick, especially when she is a young and affectionate furry _something _that displays pleasure or displeasure at will.__

__Dying alone in a squalid room with too many cats isn't a worry, yet. Not when there are the more immediate concerns of successfully getting out of bed every day, or managing to leave the flat often enough to be pronounced as 'that's not so awful then' by his Mum during their weekly telephone call. It's a delicate balance, coming up with a realist number to keep her from worrying too much, but low enough that its proximity to the truth keeps hims from feeling too guilty._ _

__Like tips of icebergs, their conversations are dwarfed by the unspoken remnants of what he inevitably overhears at family gatherings:  
_What are we going to do with Poor David?_  
_I always knew homosexuality was no good – saps the life right out of you._  
_How many years has it been since Cambridge? 10? 12?_

__11 years 9 months 14 days. Most of which he slept through in a haze of sleeping pills and allergy medication. April was the cruellest month._ _

__

____

_iii_

He keeps himself from being happy, attending funerals of strangers as penance for avoiding all the ones of those he did know.

Would it have been worse, if Hector hadn't died, would he have sat with Posner, after Cambridge, after everything, in that classroom? And would he have known just the _gobbet_ to make it easier, found a way to answer how is it to go on? Posner hasn't, not for all his years of trying; he is still wallowing in it after all, still submerged in hypotheticals. If Irwin and if Dakin were Irwin and Dakin, if he had seen it floundering, seen them come together, crash, and then flail apart, so it was no longer a kind of Camelot.

What Dakin was, that was an idea. It wasn't real. But it marked him and it marked him down, wore him out so thoroughly so that when the real thing – life – did come along, in university, at Cambridge, afterwards, he could only revert to the frenzied entreaties of a man ready to impale himself on those horns of Ideas and Remembrance. Posner's demons predate those terrifying years when it was impossible not to know about a friend of a friend; it isn't _that_ sceptre of being gay in the '80s that haunts him. But something else altogether more intangible. Literature. History. _What Might Have Been._ How he wanted to pass the parcel, pass it along, but his fingers, his fingers were brutish and dumb, they'd lost sensation and numbed out on him, so that he was stuck and dragged down. 

Posner is proud for having figured all this out. It's cold comfort, to have gone through an entire phase of 'self help' that he supposes he's still in the midst of, with the psychoanalysis and all. The allotment and Gertrude and all. It's helping at least, isn't it? He's finally admitted he needed help. _(forced to admit but no one is keeping score and he'd prefer not to think of That Time if he doesn't have to)_

If pissing away money on analysis and then tiptoeing and then tough love and then moving out with money to renovate and then weekly checkups on a thirty-something son is what it takes then _Time always enough to give it a try, right? We believe in you David, love.”_ His parents are convinced he would always be their scholarship boy deep inside, the light shrouded by a decade and then some of darkness and confusion. They have survived against the odds after all, so why shouldn't he? Why shouldn't David be able to cast off these years of accidental inertia, to move again as himself? And what better way to do this than through lessons, at which David has always excelled.

_(Thanks Mum, Da. But listen - you got the Holocaust so where am I trying to top that? The fucking Holocaust and here I am with coffee and light and attending classes learning how to open the windows all closed over in my head that prevent me from getting out of bed in the morning.)_

More steps:

Fill the room with light. Fill the day with light. Allow the body to settle into its own natural rhythms within medication cycles without other stimulants or depressants that may have unexpected effects. 

_(the body needs calls body needs rest but bodies broken edges and pieces against window pane is broken but the light is broken into two coffee in one hand the other shows the light in the mornings are the worst)_

Spend some time each day to consciously reflect on a threatening situation and why that is. Write it down if it helps.

_(Akthar Timms Rudge a Rudge home is an affordable one for the first time buyer. Dakin Timms Crowther. Akthbar Timms poor Lockwood Irwin tonight half past seven Dakin Scripps Irwin Dakin Scripps darkness at the edges fingers from the dark his fingers oh fingers are angles straight up and flights of stairs shoulderblades down lean into the keys into the voice)_

Take deep breaths. Remain centered.  
Take concrete steps towards closure.

_iv_

_(Sail in orange dust orange darkness Scripps is the orange Dakin the darkness Akthbar expects a baby daughter Crowther Magistrate Crowther Timms poor drummer Lockewood and Hector where is Hector in all of this?)_

“So you've finally gone ahead and done it.” After hours, days of agonizing over which witty line to open with, this is what he instinctively blurts out, tremors in his voice and all.  
There is a frozen moment of stillness as Scripps looks up in confusion then “Posner? My God - Pos? Is that you?” His hands leap to rub at his temples. “I don't believe it.”  
Posner frowns a little. He didn't think he'd changed that much.  
“You look exactly the same. Hair, eyes, the way you've just - “ Scripps motions, hands spastic, incredulous “The way you've just chewed on your fucking lip.” He laughs. “It's like seeing a fucking ghost.”  
“ _They are no older than I am, their feet are shoeless / They have lived a thousand years; the children are laughing / The children are laughing and their death is upon them._ ”  
Unbidden, the words leap to mind, spilling out of him and before he knows it, Posner is pulled into a tight hug. He is surprised how easily he lets himself rest a cheek against Scripps' shoulder. Still the same height after all. When they disentangle from each other, Scripps now looking faintly embarrassed across the stack of books, Posner surprises himself again with what he first thinks to say.  
“I never went to Lockwood's funeral. Timms somehow tracked me down and begged me to sing. God knows why.”  
“Why he asked, or why you didn't go?”  
“Both, I guess.”  
They lapse into stilted silence.  
“No one's heard from you for ages, Posner. _Ages._ ” Something alights in his eyes. Fear maybe. Regret? And then it's gone. Back again to the steady, good-natured Scripps. “Though Timms' got this theory that it's you writing the school letters – under a pseudonym of course.”  
Posner wonders whether to tell Scripps about the cards and the letters written on tasteful card stock, but it suddenly becomes confusing – he _had_ sent them after all? And he's besieged by a sudden fear of one day coming across an obsessively crammed drawer or box, filled with everything he'd meant to say, to write, everything he thought he had sent, all frittered away hidden in maniac bursts that he'd managed to repressed entirely.  
“Pos. Oi, Pos. Still here with us, Posner?” Scripps' forehead is lightly crinkled. Concern? Discomfort at how _off_ this whole exchange is going?  
Posner refocuses, gestures with his fingers, trying to find the right words. He settles on croaking out _sorry, temps perdu_ , a rueful smile.  
Scripps stares at him a moment longer and grins in return, more grimace than smile. “Anyway, we compared them to the cryptic-ish notes you've been sending us and decided that it couldn't have been you – not your style.”  
“Not my stylin's?” He's suddenly transformed in a Yankee drawl and hips half a-swivel. Dakin debonair in the way he'd just pushed back his hair. Going through the motions of performance calms Posner down. He could see Scripps, who laughs, is relieved too.  
“To be honest I'm surprised you even heard about my promotion that time.”  
“I've my sources.”  
“They tip you off about the reading? What, are you here to deliver a card in person”  
Posner reaches for his pocket, “I try my best not to disappoint.”  
“No!” And Scripps, all impish mischief now, reaches across the table and swats at his arm.

\-----

**_And the end of all our exploring  
(2006)_ **

_iv_

More and more of his _stuff_ wind up at Posner's, the cramped little claustrophobic cottage, which, remarkably, feels more calmed down with Scripps' belongings. It's an ending of sorts, but it's also the beginning.

_i_

So they went out for lunch soon after that first (re)meeting.

Things they do not talk about:  
\- Dakin  
\- Irwin  
\- Hector  
\- Cambridge  
\- and its aftermath  
\- The Other Boys

Things they do talk about:  
\- fucking Blair  
\- fucking Bush  
\- fucking Red Livingston  
\- his novel  
\- newsroom politics  
\- and, surprisingly, all of that stuffy lit-errrature and history from school he'd long forgotten. 

Scripps had read history after all, and as a matter of fact, so had Posner, for however long he clung on at Cambridge (Posner refuses to say, and after the first time, Scripps never asks again.), but it had never felt fully alive again as it had been that whirlwind term, and Scripps was so happy to have it all come back. They had the most marvellously ferocious argument about Salman Rushdie. 

Progress was stalling on the novel though. Perhaps Dakin was right after all this time, all literature _was_ consolation. 

Posner was in bad shape, much worse than it appeared that day at the book signing. He would miss lunches, ignore calls, drop out for months at a time. 

He's also very different. Cold and bitter, but no longer selfish about it. No longer eagerly lapping up every scrap tossed his way. But then again, Scripps is no Dakin. Never was, and probably never will be. Maybe it's a good thing.

_ii_

“In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces -”  
“Is that fucking Hardy?”  
“The call seldom produces the comer - “  
“Are you trying to quote Hardy at me, Scripps?”  
“The man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving.”  
“Do not fucking quote Hardy at me.”

_iii_

In the end, it's not entirely unexpected. Scripps, with a beer, and Posner, anxiously sipping apple juice of all things, never taking his eyes off the screen.

They're sitting on fold out chairs watching Irwin's programme and Posner flashes back to the solitary afternoons of primary school, cartoons in a living room that was overstuffed with things. Things to take comfort in, things as solidly cluttered pieces of evidence for a continued existence. His Da kept takeaway menus that came in the mail, every Sunday's newspaper. _To keep us a record_ , he had told Posner. _Too good to throw away_ , when their house slowly turned into a sanctuary for unwanted pieces of furniture from friends and relatives. 

Posner supposes he's inherited some of that, with the scrapbooks and everything. He hasn't showed Scripps yet, doesn't know if he ever will. But Scripps is here after all. Scripps has come back, and he's continued coming back to this place of no couch, no pictures but windows with blinds that must remain open. There isn't room for much of anything but talk and quick glances and remembering and then the telly if the memories grow too dense to hold in the spaces between them. Scripps watches Posner not watching him. And Posner watches their reflections.

When Irwin gets to Thatcher, to Stalinism, to Hollywood, to the dissolution of the Monasteries, all Henry the 8th, all little cycles of apotheoses echoing each other in grotesque simulacra, Scripps watches. He watches and watches and all of the weariness and wariness in Posner's eyes pulls at him, pulls in the two of them until they're both drowning in it and he has to shut it off. To shut all of it right off.

Scripps sets his bottle on the ground. _(Posner doesn't move)_ He pushes back his chair. _(Posner doesn't move)_ He stands up, turns, takes a step, leans, and left hand barely grazing Posner's jaw, presses his mouth against Posner's.

There is almost a flicker in response, but mostly they are still – objects next to one another rather than people in intimate contact. It is only when Scripps makes the motion to pull back that Posner's lips latch on to his with a sigh. And what follows, bodies swaying then standing, hands wrapped together and grappling, is instinct embedded in muscle memory. Fluid moments when the fingers take over after the first few uncertain notes. Yes, this we've played before. 

They're not boys, or even young men. Posner already haggard in age and Scripps without the hard edges and planes – now something rather more soft and blurred, doughy even. The angles are there though, obtuse rather than acute, still something to grip on to, and Posner does. He slides his hand down, between their bodies pressed together, between sharp inhalations and exhalations, between the jut of Scripps' hip and his own. Posner's eyes are still squeezed shut against the sensory overload as they settle into rocking against each other. Soft whimpers escaping between gasps. Scripps breaths out through his nostrils in through his lips. 

\-----

**_Will be to arrive where we started  
(1986)_ **

__

_iii_

Scripps doesn't come around anymore.  
He and the others called a few times, but Posner couldn't make it to the phone. Or if he didn't, he couldn't pick up. They drop by his hall unannounced. Once or twice there is pounding on the door. He doesn't want to be found.

Posner didn't even know he was looking for fairy tales, Greek myth. He didn't know until he thinks he finds it. And even then, as it turns out, no, not so, gotcha! He'll have to drop out. That much is certain. There are only so many tuts and exams he can get sick notes for before the facade collapses, along with everything else that already did.

_ii_

Posner had lost it. He was reading history for chrissakes, not media studies. And even then, it's debatable whether they'd let slip a forty page independent study analyzing the homoerotic undertones of British detective shows of the 1940s for the replacement of an entire term's work. Trouble was, even if they did, he'd actually have to write the damn thing; not just lie in front of the telly with stale donuts and tea, eyes glazed over.

He still went home for the holidays. Acquiesce simpler than having to come up with some sort of explanation, and besides, his parents missed him, the only child. The thought of May, of grades, of letters, of reports, paralyzes him. So he tries to keep it locked up in a box, tightly packed with pure nervous energy and stagnant panic. So he shut himself in his room – _the professors assigned so much work Mum, you wouldn't even believe it_. His parents certainly didn't question further, and the rest of the boys, who knew what they were up to. If they made an effort. They thought he was brilliant enough – admitted to Cambridge with a scholarship after all – but he was also _Posner_. 

They were probably going to _parties_. Getting _sloshed_. Visiting all the new friends in other cities they must have made during the term.

And what did he do, those empty winter days in Sheffield everyone and everywhere so familiar but himself so alien? Didn't write; wasn't Scripps; couldn't pretend to be someone else. That was part of the problem, wasn't it. If only he can't get out of his own skin, his own wretched pathetic Posner body, even go through the motions – must be at least half the battle

It was as though everything started moving all around, and he'd thought he'd be able to catch the fastest one of them all, only to find that his train, and his train alone, remained stuck at the station. 

Scripps tried. At least Posner think he did.

_i_

What Posner was, what Posner did, what Posner is doing, it physically hurt to think about too much. So Scripps didn't, not too much. Scripps appreciated the cleverness, loved the music, luxuriated in the times when it's the two or three or eight of them. But that's all in the past innit? Cause even then, at Cutlers with everything laid down for you, all the grown ups prepared to hold your hand right along to the end, he'd still always felt ready to watch for Posner, to rescue him, as if it were _Posner_ who'd really needed rescuing. How presumptuous was that.

Anyway, Posner certainly didn't need some nanny running behind now, making sure everything was alright. For one thing, they're in entirely different cities. (But only a 40 minute bike ride away his traitorous mind felt the need to pipe up) Point being, back in school, it wasn't just him going after Posner – Posner was always around. Holding out a bag of crisps after confession, waiting for him. Loafing in the change rooms long after everyone else had gone – well that was for Dakin who primped like a girl. But still, Posner was there.

He knew it was getting a bit unhealthy when he took to studying at Seeley. Inevitably, Posner would be there and they'd sit in carrels across from each other, just like back in Cutler's. His notebooks were dappled by secretary lamps with the glass coloured green instead of the cool darkness of the school library. It was February and the most treacherous of weather but inside, the lighting was warm and they were snugly nestled in a corner close to a radiator. Sometimes, Posner's eyes fluttered closed with the barest of contact between their feet -

_(but heat travels distances bodies can't and so slow the heat is the body and the body is heat crawling up past his knee the heat alighted straight to the edges of their toes from orange hair and red ear tips )_

\- not that he'd know, not at all having looked up from the loudness of pens scratching away. At times Scripps would end up just copying paragraphs straight out, his brain less occupied with the effort of reading than reining his focus from the writing bumps all over Posner's fingers or the movement of heat between their bodies or who pulls away first. 

When they talk, they whisper. 

“I've been reading Hardy.”  
“Hector would have been pleased.”  
“Jude the Obscure. That and watching videos. Mostly videos, actually. I'm really starting to hate history. Maybe I ought to switch to English. You think that would be allowed?”  
“Doubt it.”  
“It's worth a try though, don't you think?”  
Scripps grimaces. “I suppose. But you should stick it out. I mean, we've made it all the way here together. It'd be a shame if...” He pauses and shrugs. “Dakin once announced to me that he thought literature was really lowering - all consolation, right before attributing that thought to a bloke named _Kneeshaw_.”  
Posner quietly snorts. “Do you think so?”  
“Of course not. At least not in the way he meant it. And I don't mean that as why you shouldn't switch. But it'd be like giving up – resigning yourself.” He shrugs again. “And I didn't see you as one to do that.”

\-----

**_And know the place for the first time  
(1979)_ **

_ii_

“What a day! You ever had anyone like him?”  
“The big man?”  
“Yeah, Hector.”  
“Teaching little snot noses like us? No, never. He's like some head teacher out of a film. Or a play.”  
“Less _To Sir With Love_ more _Forty Years On_ , I'd say.”  
“Pity that.”  
“Not for me, lads.”

_iii_

He's never allowed himself the tantalizing possibilities of Oxford and Cambridge – Oxbridge, that was the proper way to say it. But it wasn't him! It was the headmaster who said it, wasn't it? That their form was exceptionally bright and should reach towards the exceptional opportunities available to students like themselves. Posner pere wants him to study something useful – engineering or maybe economics. Da is a simple man, not of letters and not taken to reading or quoting or any of that tosh. His relatives weren't all like Da though. Posner recalls a raucous evening he was barely old enough to understand, the theatrics and shouting that goes on with these gathering. “It's barbaric! It is! Barbaric, to write poetry, after.” He wonders now about reading poetry, what it is, after.

_iv_

“Are you heading over to Dakin's later?”  
“No. He's staying behind to ask questions about the English paper, the keener. Never thought he'd starting taking this seriously.”  
Posner laughs nervously, looks over his shoulder at Scripps pedaling behind him and slows down. “Should I? Are you taking it seriously?”  
“I suppose so. Foundations, keys to our future, and all that.”

__

_i_

“Heya!”  
“Pos!”  
Scripps is walking fast, and he has to set off at a skipping run just to keep up. That's alright though, Posner feels so light on his feet that he doesn't mind cantering after, galloping if need be. He is certain that if all the future days of school followed like this one, he would never run out of steam. If Mr. Hector is right, and if this is what learning, what living afire with passion meant, this is all he would ever need.

Posner glances at the boy rushing beside him and sees the same crackling energy in the lines of his swinging elbows. Before them, before all of them now, are dozens and dozens of possibilities stitching together. A curtain has risen with their collective bated breaths and all that remains to do is the step over the threshold. Posner leaps.

**Author's Note:**

> Footnotes from 2007:
> 
> From Little Gidding:  
> “Every poem an epitaph"
> 
> “We shall not cease from exploration  
> And the end of all our exploring  
> Will be to arrive where we started  
> And know the place for the first time”
> 
> From East Coker:  
> I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you  
> Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,  
> The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed  
> With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on  
> darkness,  
> And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama  
> And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away -  
> Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between  
> stations  
> And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
> 
> I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope  
> For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love  
> For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith  
> But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.  
> Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:  
> So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
> 
> From The Children Are Laughing, by Gwendolyn MacEwen :  
> They are no older than I am, their feet are shoeless  
> They have lived a thousand years; the children are laughing  
> The children are laughing and their death is upon them.
> 
> From Tess of D'Ubervilles:  
> In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving.
> 
> So. About two months ago, having to write a paper about Boethius and The Consolation of Philosophy ***** , I of course instead read all the sad-broken-apart-Posner stories I've got saved in one long txt file (yay for no internet at home!), listened to the radio play, and summarily got extremely depressed. [aside: But seriously! Posner/take_your_pick must be a goldmine haven for anyone with even the slightest hurt/comfort kink.]
> 
> I tried to call up a friend to share the _incredible pathos_ in underachieving university dropouts who then fail out of life. (oh the prescience oh how closely this hits home) but was thwarted by telephone problems. Completely miserable, I then replayed the radio play and slipped so far into the funk that it became imperative that I make Posner a happ y/ier outcome, given the playverse, given all the desolation that happens, just so I can feel a bit better, and you know, start that Boethius paper and not take a walk at 1 am to a ravine, or a foggy bridge, or other surroundings sufficiently ambiently reflective of those waves of fatalistic despair. (Yeesh - talk about consolation.)
> 
>  ***** Boethius = philsopher dude imprisoned for treason during the reign of Emperior Theodoric and eventually executed by excruciatingly painful methods.  
> Consolation of Philosphy = book he wrote while under house arrest to make himself feel better about being in the dumps. Not entirely unrelated to the trials of poor Posner.  
> 


End file.
